NYPD officer Manny Encarnacion prior to his arrest, which has been linked to the ongoing issue of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade's charges. (New York Post)

Last month, New York City police officer Manny Encarnacion was arrested in New Delhi for accidentally slipping three bullets into his suitcase. He's being detained in India until the case is closed, which has spurred American outlets to speculate on whether the arrest is thinly veiled payback for the Devyani Khobragade debacle.

According to the Wall Street Journal, New York Rep. Peter King declared that the charges were trumped up in a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry: "This excessive act by the Indian government is clearly politically motivated in response to the arrest of India's then-deputy consul general in December 2013 in New York for alleged visa fraud."

The New York Post definitively wrote, "India is getting revenge for Nannygate," while both the Post and the Journal noted that one of the officers who cuffed Encarnacion made a reference to Khobragade being strip-searched during her arrest.

Are Indian authorities still smarting from that incident? Hard to say. Weekly magazine India Today claims that's not the case: a senior official at Delhi airport said they simply held Encarnacion to the same standard that they would any Indian citizen: "If someone is carrying bullets in his baggage, it is against Indian law. There is a procedure to be followed in such cases. This is stand alone case, it has nothing to do with the Khobragade case."

As the New York Times pointed out, Encarnacion's lawyer did back this up and say the arrest “was as per the normal and standard legal procedure under which even Indians are arrested." He has also appealed to Indian authorities to drop the case, explaining that it was a genuine mistake on his client's part.

“We’ve said we want to get past some of the tensions that have been there over the past several months and move on ... I think we feel like we’ve moved past this and hope the Indians have as well."

The Hindu added that the allegations of a connection between the two incidents were “dismissed as ridiculous” by the Indian Consulate in New York.

Maybe Encarnacion's arrest wasn't a tit-for-tat maneuver. That doesn't, however, mean India has closed the book on the Khobragade affair. In Outlook magazine, Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh cited "residual issues" that she thinks still need to be sorted out—but she was quick to then say that the two countries could sit down and hash things out due to their long history of working together. For now, we'll have to wait for a giant pacifier to put this issue to bed.

US police officer Manny Encarnacion held for possessing bullets. Looks like Indo-US relations have gone from Nanny trouble to Manny trouble

"On the manual typewriter, I was 100 words a minute. That was my only claim to fame." And so begins the tale of Hilda Longinotti's 21-year tenure as "aide-de-camp" to famed designer George Nelson of the Herman Miller furniture house, brought to life in this charming four-part animated series.

When she applied to be a receptionist in 1953, Longinotti had no idea what she was in for, and she certainly didn't realize she would be working under the likes of George Nelson. A high school dropout from Queens, she happened upon the job listing while thumbing through the New York Times. "Architect" sounded fancy, so she threw her chapeau in the ring. When Longinotti walked into the office for her interview, she says she stumbled into a "world of wonders"—and never looked back.

Now, the 80-something Longinotti lends her memories and voice to The Hilda Stories, giving us another peek into the heyday of real Mad Men—but this time, not through Don Draper's whiskey-stained glasses. In the video above, Longinotti explains how a young lady had to look and act while interviewing for a job: "You have to wear a hat. You have to wear gloves. You have to wear pumps with stockings with the seams straight, and a skirt that covers the knee. And you have to be very prim and proper."

Longinotti certainly fit the part, as you can see in the photo above—so much so that she became an impromptu muse for Nelson.

"Whenever they needed a model, there I was! I was young. I was pretty. I was photogenic, and I was free ... It was one of the highlights of my career because I became the woman on the marshmallow sofa."

But Nelson gave her space—beyond just that marshmallow sofa. Longinotti evolved into more than just a pretty face perched on it. "When I started with him, I had no balls," she says. "But over the 20 years, I grew them and grew them and grew them. So I think he’d be very proud of the ballsy woman I have become today."

When I flew home a few months back, my mother welcomed me at the airport with dinner in a tiffin carrier, a multi-tiered stainless steel lunch box used across India, but most famously in the city of Mumbai. She insisted that after all these years, a tiffin carrier is still the best way to transport food: each item stays hot and partitioned until the meal is delivered and ready to be eaten. My mother is not one to serve up lukewarm, soggy roasted potatoes, and the Indian diaspora would bobble its head in agreement.

The tiffin carrier is at the center of writer-director Ritesh Batra's recent film, The Lunchbox, the entire premise of which is based on an unlikely error at the hands of Mumbai's white-capped delivery boys. The dabbawalas, as they're called, pick up tiffin carriers from mothers and wives stocked with freshly cooked rice, lentils, and curries and distribute them to the offices of their sons and husbands exactly at lunchtime. Some 4,000 such men manage to cart 175,000 lunches across the city daily, without missing a step: the margin of error is thought to be 1 in over a million, despite their use of a rudimentary coding system that dates back over 100 years.

The system is so efficient, in fact, that Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke conducted an entire case study on it, and the research is referenced in The Lunchbox by an obstinate dabbawala who refuses to accept that his brethren have made a mistake. The movie's love story unfolds when two tiffin carriers in identical garb are swapped, sending a wife's aphrodisiac-infused meals to the wrong man. There's an inherent suspension of disbelief, though not in the love-drenched way we've come to expect of Indian films; rather, we're expected to believe that the lunchbox is delivered incorrectly not once, but repeatedly, so much so that the protagonists carry on a snail mail-borne romance via carrier dabbawala.

What's perhaps most impressive is that many of the delivery men are only semi-literate, which explains why they continue to label the tiffin carriers by colors and numbers. A single tin can change hands more than four times as it makes its way from a bike handle to the train station, and then from the special dabbawala car to its final destination. It's this dichotomy—that unskilled workers can produce impeccable results when faced with a complex task—that makes the dabbawala model so compelling from a business perspective.

The dabbawalas confirm the numbering of the tiffin boxes during their train ride. (BBC)

Turns out it makes for a beautiful film, as well. You'd think that, being based in Mumbai, India's booming film industry might have looked to its dabbawalas earlier to tell a story that—with the exception of the catalyzing gaffe—is rooted in reality. Each day, the leading lady calls out to the nosy aunty next door for cooking tips and missing ingredients, while the man she inadvertently romances is shown riding the city's oppressively crowded buses with his colleague, who spends the ride home chopping vegetables on his briefcase. In yet another frame, you might see the dabbawalas riding in their train car with empty tiffin boxes, singing together after a day spent filling stomachs.